Measuring roughly 23 metres by 4 metres, it was a slender, purposeful rectangle, the kind of feature that once signalled a certain level of landed ambition; a managed water body stocked for the table, attached to a substantial house. Today it is not visible at ground level, its outline surviving only in the record of the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map from 1839, where it appears as a tidy shape southeast of Killahy Castle. By the time the revised edition was published in 1900, it had been dropped from the map altogether.

The broader context comes from the historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, who noted the extensive ruins of a fine mansion at Killahy dating to around 1700. He recorded both a fish-pond and a lake on the property, and observed that both had dried up. The fish-pond would have belonged to the ornamental and practical landscape typical of a gentry house of that period, when the capacity to maintain such features reflected the resources of the household as much as its aesthetic tastes. The mansion itself is ruins now, and the fish-pond has retreated further still, below the surface of grassland that gives no indication anything lies beneath it.